Stair boundary extraction using the 2D laser scanner

This paper proposes a method to detect stair boundaries for a humanoid robot. To measure accurate boundaries of stair surfaces, a 2D laser scanner is installed on the head of a humanoid robot called MAHRU-1. By moving the head up and down, the 3D point depth map around a robot is obtained from the 2D laser scan data. After generating the 3D point depth map around a robot, a calibration method is applied to the 3D data to obtain the accurate 3D point depth map. After calibrating the 3D map, the boundaries of obstacles such as stairs are extracted from the 3D point depth map. Finally, performance of the proposed method is discussed with experimental results. The results show that the proposed method is effective to detect the boundaries of the stairs accurately for generating the walking motion of a humanoid robot.